As Sirens Call the Sailors
by Assimbya
Summary: Based on The 1001 Nights/Arabian Nights. Scheherazade and Julnar are very different women.


Scheherazade cannot stop speaking. Her throat dries and aches in the closed sanctuary of the bedchamber, her husband and sister's eyes upon her, alert for any failure (Dunyazade's wide with trepidation, Shahryar's narrow in close focus), but she can pause for breath only when the story wills it, taking her respite only when she can leave the Sultan in suspense. During the daylight hours she barely speaks now, drinking honeyed tea and willing her voice to keep its strength and timbre, but here it is all she can rely upon, the narrow rope which holds her to her survival.

A few times she has been granted silence by Shahryar's desire, nights when he has banished Dunyazade from the room and gazed at her with such intentness that she feared he would kill her himself, there, without waiting for the executioner. Scheherazade knows what it means for Shahryar to touch her, knows how he fears his own desire as weakness, believes his capacity for love to be the means by which he will be destroyed. She knows, as surely as if he told her (though he never speaks of this, not to her nor anyone else), that he thinks of each time he made love to his first queen as her poison sinking into his skin, eroding his will, clouding his sight. She has been cautious, then, as she weaves desire into her tales, showing it to be joyous and fatal, bawdy and beautiful. She herself was a virgin, before she came to his bed. She can shape her tongue around the most ribald of stories, but when he first touched her body she was shocked into silence, overcome with his closeness.

She had planned out how the consummation would go (as she had planned everything else, for Scheherazade thinks of all of her life as a plot, a scene, a narrative, sets the stage and shapes her dialogue in advance), how she would perform her own innocence and surety, her modest, unthreatening desire for her husband, but when the time came she could not hold to it. He undressed her with his steady fingers and she imagined all the wives Shahryar had deflowered and then sent to their deaths, how much each of them must have trembled in his arms, the pretty ways they might have tried to win his affection and thus his mercy. She knew that it was only her voice which made her different from them, and her voice did not matter there. He touched her and her composure shattered and she wept, and thought she had ruined everything, shown herself to be a weak, death-worthy woman like any other. But he was silent, and tender, and, when the morning came, he did not call the executioner.

* * *

Julnar cannot speak. It is difficult even to breathe in the harsh, dry air, so different from the soft embrace of the sea. At the first moment, when the net tangled around her body, she tried to scream out to her father and sisters for help, and her throat would not work to produce any intelligible sound.

Later, she could feel the muscles of her body adjusting themselves to the land, and she realized that she knew again how to speech. She watched the fisherman who had caught and bound her, traced the line of his eyes as he evaluated her with caution, and she could imagine telling him who she was, begging his mercy, pleading to be safely returned to her father's house. But she thought also that she could not bear to hear the name her mother gave her, the name of a princess, becoming an appellation for a bound captive. Perhaps he would think her crazed with the sun and salt, telling outlandish tales. Perhaps he would not believe her. Or perhaps he would believe her, and use it to his profit, making her father empty the seas of pearl and coral to satisfy his greed.

She was only her father's youngest daughter. She could not cause him such shame and grief.

And so Julnar was silent, as the fisherman poked and prodded and tried to make her speak. When the morning came, her brought her to the slave market, and there she lowered her face behind her dark hair and kept her mouth closed while men who smelled like metal tried every language they could remember on her. She felt lost and alone, human voices and breath around her, smells of oil and meat and spice in the air. The robe the fisherman had given her felt stiff and strange against skin which had known only sand and sea foam. She did not know much about humans, but she knew enough to read desire in the men who looked at her, desire for her body and for the wealth they could gain from it. If she spoke, they would expect her to know the behavior expected of a slave, of a woman in their world. And she did not. She did not know what modesty would mean to them, or respect, or acquiescence.

Money changed hands, and the fisherman found himself richer from the last day's catch than he ever could have imagined, and Julnar saw that, however much they tried to crack the shell of her silence, they did not truly need her voice in order to profit from her.

* * *

Scheherazade bows to Shahryar, as she does every night without fail. "Greetings, my husband," she tells him, "I am honored to be in your presence." And, as always, he lifts her to her feet, and she feels the touch of his hands as a benediction, an assurance that his enthrallment to her voice has not turned into rage. "My young sister hopes for one of my stories to soothe her before bed. I would be grateful if you would let me call her here."

The words are ritual now, and both of them know it. Some may call the Sultan mad, but he is not stupid. If he despised the deception of her pretense, she would long since be dead now. But she cannot push aside the ornament of ritual and say to him, "Let me tell you a story." The peace that they share, the slow building of trust, is so tenuous that Scheherazade dares not disturb it even in the slightest of ways. She can speak to him in her stories; this is what she has, this space of color and intricacy where she can whisper in lust or raise her voice in rage, talk of despotic kings and lonely ones, make the whole bright bedchamber into her kingdom. Shariyar is hers, when Scheherazade speaks. But never can she forget that she is also his, to command and wed and kill.

Shahryar assents; Dunyazade is sent for, and arrives with prompt propriety, her manners as careful and studied as Scheherazade's own, the mark of the good upbringing of a Vizier's daughters.

They settle. Scheherazade's fingers pick at the hem of her clothing, and then settle. She breathes into the anticipatory space, and gathers up her will and skill and memory. "Once," she begins, "there was a maiden named Julnar, a princess of sea…"

* * *

Julnar is sold, as it happens, to a Sultan, a great ruler thoug, she thinks, not so great as her own father. His eyes are warm, edged with fine lines from smiles. "We think muteness to be no defect," he says, not touching her, not yet, though she knows he shall, he shall, "and certainly not in a woman so beautiful. It would be as precious as gold to have a modest woman who we can trust never to reveal our secrets. We will take her as our own."

His body is a human body, and she thinks, when he touches her, of how different it would have been to have mated with one of her own kind, in warm waters at noon. The feelings are strange, and yet she does not cry out. He is not trying to hurt her. He strokes her hair and speaks soothingly afterwards, as if he thinks she shall be in need of comfort, and his words barely reach her, but only the tone of them, his deep voice trying at gentleness. He comes to her often, as the weeks wear on, and she becomes aware of how the other women around her are looking at her, how she is seen as one favored. He gives her jewels and silks and pearls, and she weeps thinking of the wealth that has been stolen from her father. She thinks that, if she could speak, it would be to tell him that she lives, and thinks of him still.

She becomes pregnant. She does not know what the child will be, a thing of land and water, a thing of words and silence, a child of two royal lines but the heir to neither. She does not know how she will raise a child with all the speech clogged up in the base of her throat and grief dripping still from the tips of her hair.

* * *

Scheherazade takes the mornings to rest. Stories tangle up in her mind, and everything feels loud with the sound of her own voice, and so she always sends her servants away and watches the sunrise as she tries to sleep.

This morning she cannot stop thinking about silence. She remembers the birth of her child, the boy whose parentage the Sultan cannot doubt, for he has left her with no leisure for adultery, and how the pain of her body seemed to banish all her stories from her thoughts. She felt rushed, throughout the birth, eager to be done with the messy business of blood and effort so that she could be herself again, contained and articulate, not screaming as if the date of her execution had come.

She thinks of everything she did not say when she showed the boy to Shahryar, of her faint wish that the execution order might be lifted fading at his caution, at his refusal to hold the child in his arms. It was a relief to return to storytelling, liberated from the necessity of trying to speak to him in her voice, as herself, as Scheherazade to Shahryar.

What would she say, if she spoke as Scheherazade? What is she trying to say, behind the continuing flow of tales that will never end? _This is truth, this is what the world is._ But, no, that is the storyteller speaking, not she herself, not the woman who heard the harem girls weeping each night and decided to take the Sultan's rage upon her own body and her own voice.

Scheherazade would say: _I love you. You can trust me._

Scheherazade would say: _I hate you for what you have done to the women of our city. I hate you for what you have done to me. You have flavored my meals with fear and I can never taste anything else._

Scheherazade would say: _I believe you can change. I believe you can heal. I believe this is not the end._

She slept, and dreamed that she spoke to the sea-princess of her story. She was arguing with her vigorously, telling her, "You must speak, you must break your silence. You must understand; you cannot fight like this, you cannot resist, you cannot make anything _change._ How can you live without speaking? How can you hold any power? You are fooling yourself if you think this can be defiance."

But Julnar shook her head, and her hair rippled like waves beneath the sun, and it seemed to Scheherazade that she could hear her voice, even though her lips did not move. _Silence has its own strength. They want my voice; they desire it, as they desire my body. They want to hear me plead with them, flirt and wheedle to get what I want. They think they can control my words as easily as they control the rest of me. It frightens them, when they can't._

"Why frighten them?" Scheherazade answered, "Why keep yourself apart? Why not live in the world, and speak, and shape what is around you?"

Julnar's eyes were large and dark. _How could I speak without lying?_

Scheherazade woke with the sun high in the sky, and her head throbbing in pain.

* * *

When her son was born, Julnar opened her mouth and named him.


End file.
